ENDGAME: AMERICA (Part 1 of 2)

Near-silently, I padded through the grasslands, crouching down low, the chill air frosting my breath with every exhale. I hoped -- nay, prayed -- I would be unseen by the hastily-deployed military and civilian martial-law enforcement squads.

Following the roads was simply not an option. The checkpoints were placed every few miles leading out of Atlanta, and every one of them had armed personnel with ballistic armor. Some even had lightly-armored vehicles. No matter if you went by back roads or expressway, there they were - and all of them had a school bus or two to ferry you to either a camp, or simply back to Atlanta.

I saw two patrolling martial-law troops in the distance, and, knowing they had infra-red detection, threw myself quickly into a small gully, hoping to break the line of sight to me.

I waited. I listened. After a time, I heard them re-enter their vehicle and drive off. I had not been seen.

It was my goal to make it to the coast and somehow -- any way possible -- flee the country of my birth, the United States of America. Something horrible had happened to her, and that which we believed "could never happen here", happened here. We had become a brutal, oppressive tyranny whose underpinnings were now communist. We had squandered the gift of freedom.

I remembered the events of the last few weeks: How, on October 1st, 2013, the government shut down. I seldom paid attention to the news, and when I did -- tuning into CBS or NBC for the nightly updates -- I had always viewed the constant political struggles between the Republicans and the Democrats to be nothing more than posturing and politics, all nonsense, and all meaningless to my life.

The shutdown dragged on, and frankly, I didn't know who was at fault. It seemed the White House and the Senate were being obstinate and unwilling to compromise, but I also wondered why the Republicans couldn't simply let go of their desire to delay or defund Obama's health care plan. Sure, I had looked at the plan, and it seemed simply awful -- but politics always had a way of fixing the unacceptable over time, or so I thought.

Soon the shutdown went against something the talking heads called the 'debt limit', and again -- not being an accountant -- I paid little attention to it all. The problems started in November of 2013.

I had noticed on various internet news sites, that Obama's White House had been shutting down things that didn't seem to make sense -- a private monument known as the World War II memorial, highways near Mount Rushmore, and even a stretch of ocean eleven-thousand square miles large. None of these needed Federal funds, so why were they shut down? It seemed petty and vindictive to me, and I was surprised at the petulance and arrogance of Obama -- a man I had voted for in 2008.

The White House announced it would 'be forced' to stop all Social Security, Medicaid, and EBT funding in November, because of the debt limit, and because funding had stopped. The Republicans quickly gave in to all of the White House and the Senate's demands. Strangely, even though the Democrats got every single thing they asked for, they refused to approve the funding bills and the debt increase. They claimed that there was more they now wanted.

Republicans rushed bill after bill out of the House, and each time, the Senate rejected the funding bill. I began to see that the press on which I had relied, all these years, might not be impartial after all. To every increased demand by the Democrats, the press reacted with approval, and when the Republicans met that increased demand, the press savaged their 'intransigence'. It all seemed so bizarre to me.

November the first passed, and reports began to emerge of seniors being evicted, and EBT food stamp cards not working. Sporadically, I heard of small riots. These began to grow in number, even in Atlanta. On the third day of these increasingly-common riots, I started to get concerned. I contacted a friend, asked if I could stay at his house in the countryside -- he said yes -- and contacted my boss to get a week vacation until all the strife blew over.

I was gathering my belongings for my little 'vacation', including my prized AR-15 rifle, and was packing my car, when I noticed smoke starting to rise from the Atlanta skyline. What was going on???!? I went back into my house, turned on the local news, and was greeted with a live broadcast of a major riot that seemed to stretch for miles. The news helicopter was showing numerous fires burning, and people -- so small from the camera's altitude -- milling about. The news reporter in the chopper seemed aghast. She was saying, in a trembling voice, that many murders and assaults were being reported, that there was widespread looting, and that the National Guard had been called in.

I decided not to leave yet. I wanted to know that it was safe before I left. I scanned various national news channels, and was greeted with reports of similar riots occurring in many major cities. People were angry, violent, and things were quickly spinning out of control.

As I watched these events unfold on live TV, about six hours after the first reports, an Emergency Broadcast Bulletin came on. I was warned to stay in my home, that there was a twenty-four-hour-a-day curfew in effect. Soon afterwards, a national news figure came on, and reported that President Obama had invoked the Emergency Powers Act.

I sat, stunned, and suddenly very chilled. I, a good liberal, had payed a lot of attention to this Act. Born decades earlier, the intent was to give a President a chance to resurrect America after a nuclear war. It allowed the President absolute, dictatorial powers. The Congress and the Senate were removed from the decision-making process and all American assets could be seized by the President. I had been terrified when Bush -- that damned idiotic monkey -- had been in office, that he would use some excuse to invoke this Act.

But the Act had been invoked by MY guy. I felt betrayed and terrified. I made a decision to quickly escape to my friends house, then... perhaps... flee the country for a while, until America returned to normal. I grabbed my passport and some money I keep in the house. My rifle, ammunition, food and water, and changes of clothing were already in the car. I got into my vehicle and made for the expressways.

I found quickly that the expressways leading out of Atlanta were jammed. No traffic was moving. I pulled my car off to the side, grabbed as much food and water as I could carry, and my rifle. Luckily I lived on the outskirts of Atlanta and could make my way out by following a path that occasionally had stretches of woodlands, where I could move undetected.

I saw many people who had made my decision -- some armed, some unarmed -- and we slowly migrated out of Atlanta. After about a day of walking, we were well outside the Perimeter. Some of us huddled in a circle, and they held a vote on where to go and decided to remain as a group. They asked me to join, but I declined. I had always been a bit of a loner.

The next few days consisted of my hiding and trying to escape the carnage in Atlanta. I traveled by night and slept by day. I avoided contact with all other people -- I had enough food and water to last five days, I figured -- and I especially avoided anyone in a uniform. I observed, and went around, military checkpoints. Once in a while I'd stop to see what they were doing. Generally, they were getting people out of cars, frisking them for weapons, and putting them on school busses. When a bus would fill up, it would depart for points unknown and a uniformed man would pull up a new, unloaded one.

This was awful. I didn't quite know what was going on, but I sure didn't like the look of it.

But that was then. This is now. My food has run out, and my stomach is growling. I saw a small house standing alone and silhouetted against the rising half-moon, and I decided to see if anyone was there -- and get a meal, somehow, any way I could. I began to make my way there.

I had almost reached the house when I heard the thrumming of helicopter blades getting closer, and heard vehicles roaring towards me from several directions. In a matter of minutes I found myself surrounded, the helicopter blazing a light at me and clearly showing my position. Soldiers poured from the vehicles, armed with rifles, all pointed at me. A loudspeaker ordered me to place my rifle at my feet, and show my hands. I was outnumbered, and clearly outgunned. I did as they asked, was taken into custody, and was brought -- bound with plastic handcuffs -- to a checkpoint. I was rudely pushed onto the bus, and took my seat, uncomfortably.

I had time to think, as the bus filled up, about what had happened. In retrospect, it was clear that my voting for Barack Obama the first time had been a tragic mistake. I didn't vote at all in 2012 -- I really didn't like Mitt Romney -- but I couldn't bring myself to vote for Barack Obama again. But, in 2008, I -- like many of my peers -- thought that the chance to 'do penance' for all the wrongs visited on people of color, over all of America's history, was a way to right a multi-generational wrong. Little did I know I would be voting for a bloody, horrible tyrant.

Have you read what happened to a group of horse folks at the Talladega National Forest last weekend? The fedgoons are trying to spark a violent response, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

*****

Talladega: Insane day and night dealing with psycho government fedaralis. Imagine doing a fast 50 in very hot, humid conditions over rugged trails. Some were still on trail finishing up the 75. You’ve all been up since 4 AM. At 10 PM the federalis showed up and said EVERYBODY OUT NOW!! 100 big rigs backed in all around tricky pine tree parking areas, DARK, your stuff is scattered everywhere, horses are tired and need to rehydrate. We said, “FIRST thing as soon as it’s light”. NO NOW!! or you will be ticketed, prosecuted, towed. TOWED WHERE WITH WHAT? What could even get IN these parking places at night? More threats. Now there’s a traffic jam building up through camp with long trails of red tail lights at a standstill. “What about the people who came from Texas and Louisiana, came in off the trail and had a few drinks, this is insane! None of these people are really safe driving a big rig on the road at this time of night after a day like this!”

This is where I saw what gov. healthcare will be like. You have a local official who is probably a nice person who agrees with you, but he has this boss, who has a boss, who has a boss, and they don’t get it...and if HE doesn’t carry through with orders HE will get a huge fine. They would love to stand up for you but when it comes to your family or his well, sorry. This ride is actually a BENEFIT ride for the Talladega National Forest. They stood to make thousands. It has to be closed down because the person who empties the kiosk with the money in it was on forced furlough.

Actually, that person came out to visit with us all day because these volunteers help him do his job every day of the year. The management from this ride literally is the maintenance crew for this trail system and donates hundreds of hours labor per year. Actually, this ride is the reason this camp is as large as it is since they got the grants, and did much of the work to build it.

HERE’S THE KICKER...the officials say, “Ok, you can stay till morning...OVER THERE.” WHERE?? The day parking area on the other end of camp that doesn’t have a kiosk. “You are kidding, right?” Nope, that was the sort of logic you get from a far removed government official (the kind that will be making your healthcare decisions. There is a day parking area just as you turn in off the road into camp. There is no gate between them, it’s just a different designation.

An entire over crowded horse camp with over 100 rigs and exhausted horses and riders was supposed to hook up, load it all, back up around a bunch of pine trees on the sides of hills in the dark, and shift your rigs about 100 yards crammed into a tiny parking area for the next 5 hours or so, then try to get everyone turned around and back out in the morning. The insanity of it was soo frustrating.

I know that in Washington they all imagined us furious at those who shut down the government. They were WRONG. I really didn’t hear anyone talking about either party, we were talking about a federal government that is inept and out of control. Personally, it made me see how much WASTE is involved with the federal government and that they are too far removed and cumbersome to be logical about anything.

Think about it, because they needed to save the money to pay one person to empty a kiosk, thus would lose a couple of $100 in fees, they lost thousands of dollars that the riders who were already on site were going to donate to the forest. In order to ENFORCE the closure, though they couldn’t afford one man to empty the kiosk, they spent thousands in overtime to send a CREW from Montgomery to work all night with marshals to throw us out!

The amount of money spent not to spend money was insane, but the federal government probably does it every day of every week. Rather than risk some psycho physically forcing us to leave our horses, or haul them with our rig off to what…a holding yard where nobody is allowed to touch them because they’re under forced furlough? We loaded up and pulled out of camp headed for home near midnight. We had been up since 4. The horses were tired and dehydrated. It was NOT good for them and I worried until we unloaded them save at home at 3:30 AM. It was NOT safe for us to be driving.

We had a car and a truck there, 3 drivers, so fortunately when Josie started nodding off at her wheel I was fortunately able to take over. Don’t know what anyone who was alone and no place to take a horse would do, maybe pull over but what do you do with horses?

I talked to several people including quite a few who are furloughed and the mood was not “Oh well, they’ve made it so unpleasant for us, let’s give in”. The mood was, “These people are out of control and somebody’s got to stop them. Now is as good a time as any”. Having some faceless person several safe levels away from the action making life and death calls for you is an awful situation. I just hope that those naïve people who have pushed for it will feel the consequences in time to turn this country around.

The 80' was the song lyric, with that having come from some other song "Seven League boots" or something like that...

Last I checked (some years ago) "cheap" bottom paint was around $80 per gallon, if one got lucky. $120 more available.

A guy could spend several hundred dollars a gallon, if he thought it would make him go faster. :o)

Myself, it was always crude and rude, pressure wash (if possible) scrape, rinse and let dry, then roll the paint on. Usually needed to put the boat back in the water while bottom paint still tacky, for best effect, though in later years this was reversed, with 24 hours recommended drying time, instead of the previous DO NOT wait 24 hours, but more like splash the boat back in as soon as possible.

Fishing boats. Spent many years on boats approx. 75' overall or "Panama" length. Those boats were frequently registered much shorter (as short as possible) for insurance reasons.

Rudder post to waterline shear, and not an inch longer, raise caine with the marine surveyor to get it done.

Never worried about having the smoothest surface possible under the waterline (like sanding/surfacing for hours, yachty-style).

Haul-out days were usually pricey, though one would as often as not get 2-3 days as part of the haul-out costs. I'll admit to having never careened -- and that could a tough proposition nowadays, given all the environmental laws. They don't want those barnacles, once attached, to be scraped off and dropped back into the water, even though those same barnacles are attached to the newer generation bottom paints which are not as "poisonous" as in the good 'ol days.

They get all freaky over lead, and copper too, but the metals are not that much of a problem until methylated...

Only a few times on vessels I crewed or skippered (over a 30 yr span) did the owner spring for the "yard" to do all the painting --- so I've scraped and painted a few.

I confess to over the years buying only a few gallons of bottom paint with my own money, but tried to always treat the stuff like I did. Put it on not too thin, not too think, don't spill it, don't waste a drop, if possible. I do remember when I thought $35 bottom paint was pricey, but complaining then didn't do any good,unless one wanted to pay more. Late '70's, early to mid 80's. It's been going up steadily ever since, with the enviro's making the price explode, and the effectiveness diminish all at the same time.

Great story, Laz.

This post from Saturday made me sick to my stomach with fear. (We have three kids, there is no easy out or quick fix for us.)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3075326/posts
Political bridge-building is usually considered a good thing, but when the “bridge” you are building is the abridgement of the separation of powers, not so much. More Obama Domestic Abuse: Now Look What You Made Me Do… on tap.

In an alarming development, word comes from Mark Levin and others in Congress that the President is prepping to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally. You know — usurping the power of the purse granted solely to Congress. That ladies and gentlemen, is impeachment worthy.

Mark Levin gets it and America better pay attention:

OBAMA: “An economic shutdown, that results from Default, would be dramatically worse.”

LEVIN: You get it? You get it, folks? He’s laying the foundation for exactly what I’m saying.

He is going to break the debt ceiling. He is going to spend more than Congress has authorized. He’s preparing to do it… If he can’t get what he wants, he is going to circumvent the United States Constitution… And I smell this a mile away.

And he’s being encouraged repeatedly by pseudo-intellectuals, by Marxists dressed up as Constitutionalists, by people in his own party, he’s being encouraged to conduct himself as a dictator, and to bypass Congress and to bypass the Constitution, why work with him?

They want a full-blown Constitutional crisis. Please, listen to me, this is what they want! So they can continue to shred it!

This is why Obama won’t budge, like Clinton did and Carter did and Reagan did and Ford did and Nixon did. He’s the only one who won’t negotiate. This is why. This is his fundamental transformation. And I’m going to keep hollering this as loudly as I can because more and more people need to see it!

The president has morphed into a dictator and is donning his brand new, Marxist threads. Proudly I might add. I have never seen such arrogance. It is stunning.

This morning I read a post by Doug Ross, who really gets it. I want to give you what I consider to be the most alarming news to date and I thought I had seen it all (note to self: never think that):

Consider the most terrifying thing I’ve heard all week: on Fox News Special Report, Amy Stoddard — the left wing writer for Roll Call — said the following:

There is a report out that says the President believe he’s going to “reorder” the [balance of] power in Washington between the branches with this exercise.

Such an act would be an unprecedented high crime against the Constitution. No less an authority than the left-leaning Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard describes it as such in no uncertain terms.

Professor Tribe … rejected the idea, saying it was proposed by “otherwise very sensible law scholars” who in this case had concocted “a prescription for a free-for-all that abandons the rule of law.”

“We have no metric for comparative lawlessness,” he said.

You can bet that old spider, George Soros, is somewhere in all this mess. Mark my words. If the Leftists do this, it won’t just be a Constitutional crises… it will be revolutionary. And I mean that in every sense of the word.

The Obama administration is predicting doom and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is about to kill us all:

The U.S. Treasury heated up the tone of Washington’s debt-ceiling debate on Thursday, with a report that warned of possible economic disaster if Congress and President Obama can’t reach a debt-ceiling deal.

The latest report will draw critics who will state its stark language supports the bargaining position of the Obama administration. And that language is frightening indeed.

“In the event of a default, the U.S. economy could be plunged into a recession worse than any seen since the Great Depression,” the report said.

“A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic: credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket, the negative spillovers could reverberate around the world, and there might be a financial crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008.”

In a statement accompanying the report, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the situation was dire.

“As we saw two years ago, prolonged uncertainty over whether our nation will pay its bills in full and on time hurts our economy,” Lew said. “Postponing a debt ceiling increase to the very last minute is exactly what our economy does not need—a self-inflicted wound harming families and businesses. Our nation has worked hard to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, and Congress must act now to lift the debt ceiling before that recovery is put in jeopardy.”

Dogs and cats living together, blah, blah, blah… Therefore, they must, must do something! Constitution be damned and all that. They do this every time. Bored now. Just bring on the apocalypse already. I’d rather fight to the death than be bored to death by bureaucrats and Marxists. Enough said.

More details from The Examiner:

According to sources in Congress and the White House, Barack Obama is preparing to usurp the Constitutional power of Congress to control the purse strings of the federal government. The Obama plan entails using the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to bypass Congress on the upcoming debt ceiling debate and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling without the approval of Congress.

On Thursday Mark Levin cited several Congressional sources who have told him that Obama has no intention of negotiating with Congress on the debt, which is just under $17 trillion, the highest in U.S. history. When unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare are added in, the real debt is over $125 trillion — a figure so astronomically high that the country has no hope of ever paying it back. Uncontrolled spending has led the nation to this point.

According to Levin, Congressional sources say that Obama does not want any limits on his spending ability, in spite of the fact that the Constitution specifically gives Congress the power to control spending. Further, the use of the 14th Amendment to bypass Congress has never been done before. Thus, such an act would be an entirely new “interpretation” of the 14th Amendment and would raise a plethora of Constitutional issues concerning separation of powers.

I absolutely believe that Obama will do this. I noticed this morning that Pelosi, Lew and Carney all call this a “unicorn theory” and the only option is to have Congress act. They deny that Obama would ever do such a thing – but notice, that the MSM only says that Obama shys away from the concept. That doesn’t mean he won’t do it – it is called plausible deniability. Also note… anyone who has been in corporate America can vouch for this, when executives are called into a meeting and told that rumors that the company is in trouble are unfounded — that the company has never been stronger — that is the time that those executives go out and freshen up their resumes, because the crap is about to hit the proverbial fan.

CNBC says that Obama’s minions think he has footing for this:

WASHINGTON — Even as President Obama insists that he would be powerless to save the economy from catastrophe should Congress fail to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, some law professors say he does have options. They may be politically unattractive, unpalatable to the financial markets and subject to legal challenges, these experts say, but these choices are better than failing to live up to the nation’s financial commitments.

One is grounded in an aggressive understanding of presidential power, the second in an interpretation of an obscure provision of the 14th Amendment and the third on a choice among three irreconcilable constitutional obligations.

Two CNBC Videos on the page both of which can be found here http://www.cnbc.com/id/101086504

If Obama violates the Constitution so blatantly, it will be political suicide. But does he care? I don’t think he does. I don’t think he has a problem with putting the Constitution aside and doing what he thinks is best for the country, the collective and for Progressive Marxists. He is the ultimate wife beater and is telling America: “I Won’t Violate The Constitution, Unless You Make Me…”

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